Ubuntu Summit Jam

This past weekend was Ubuntu Global Jam, where Ubuntu users and contributors all over the world get together to work on improving the project. Jams come in many forms, code hacking, bug triaging, translating, documenting, or even just promoting Ubuntu in their community. In my own corner of the Ubuntu community, a few of us got to together to work on improving the Summit project

This is the code behind http://summit.ubuntu.com, which provides the UDS scheduler and sponsorship application forms. Summit is a Django application, released under the AGPLv3 license, and is primarily developed by community members. Joining me were Chris Johnston, a frequent community contributor who I’ve also worked with in LoCo Directory and other projects, and Elliot Murphy, my 3rd-level boss as Canonical (no pressure there!).

Here’s a list of what we managed to accomplish:

Switch to the new ubuntu-community-webthemes, which will give us the “mothership” top-navigation links as seen on planet.ubuntu.com and wiki.ubuntu.com

Started work on integrating Summit with Django testing framework.

Bug #643012: Register Interest should only show currently available tracks

Currently when you register your interest in a track, the form shows tracks for previous summits. This will restrict it to just the tracks for the summit you’re registering for.

We have been working with the makers of Conventionist, a convention management application, which will allow you to track your session schedule on your Android or iPhone, even getting directions to the correct room. This fix was necessary for them to distinguish plenary sessions from regular ones.

Allows Summit to schedule which UDS attendees are willing to act as event crew, with the current day’s crew assignments listed on the daily schedule which is displayed on the large monitors during the event.

This solved an administrative headache for those organizing the summit. For past events, every available time slot had to be entered manually, which was a very time consuming task. This provides them a quick way to pre-populate the time slots, with the ability to fine-tune just the ones that need it.

Several features of Summit require that you log in using your SSO/Launchpad account. However, after login you are currently redirected back to the main Summit page instead of the page you left. This sends your current page URL as the path to redirect to after a successful login, so you no longer have to go find that page again.